Both Modernity as a historical phenomenon and Modern philosophy as a corpus of ideas bear a definite relation to the present day. Contemporary continental philosophy and history of philosophy overlap where the need to secure a particular status for canonical philosophers of the past is concerned. There is much emphasis today on the role played by Modern philosophy in the shaping of the Western legacy, for better and for worse. For instance in the guise of attacks on and defenses of the project of Enlightenment, particular aspects of Modern thought have been dug up time and again in the past few decades and held to account. Bernard Freydberg complicates the modality of time that is involved in this kind of exercise, by tracing the reverberations of abyssal qualities of Greek poetry and thought in the thought of some of the most well-known Modern philosophers. He provides ‘endarkenment’ (8). The guiding concept here is anteriority, which is explained as providing a ‘darkly indicated horizon’ set out primarily in this Greek context, but resounding in Modern philosophy simultaneously as a condition for systematic thought and as the ‘discomfort’ (33) that is caused by the very attempt to put this horizon into words, i.e. into system. The attempt to rewrite Modern philosophy through this lens of anteriority engages the latter in a peculiar fashion. Two philosophers have ‘their own chapter’: Spinoza and Schelling. The strategy of the book is to place Schelling at the end, as the clearest example of the connection to the unruliness of Greek thought (the chapter on Schelling is duly called ‘Unruly Greek Schelling’). This is in part an outcome of Freydberg's earlier engagement with Schelling in Schelling's Dialogical Freedom: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now (2008). Spinoza is seen as ‘modern philosophy purified’ (75) and declared a ‘forerunner’ (33) to Schelling. The chapters on Spinoza and Schelling are followed by a coda on Nietzsche (or at least ‘the early Nietzsche’, 31), where it is claimed that the ‘ears’ of all three allowed them to hear what remained inaudible in the traditions in which they found themselves, and that this allowed them to be stirred by ‘the phenomenon called the Dionysian by Nietzsche’ (both, 124). This phenomenon is one and the same as the ‘dark origin of modern philosophy’, ‘that dark, Delphic region accessible by nonrational means alone’ (both, 1) later identified as anteriority.

If this seems like a confusing way to present the outline of a book, that should be taken as an indication that the structure itself refuses to be limited to a historical overview of the more ‘accustomed’ kind (Freydberg references this difference in relation to its subject matter on the first page). Preliminary Matters are followed by the first full chapter, Fissures in the History of Modern Philosophy (chapter 1), which is followed by Prelude: On Anteriority. The Prelude then sets the stage for the two chapters mentioned above, dedicated to Spinoza (chapter 2) and Schelling (chapter 3) respectively. In between Schelling and Spinoza stands Intermezzo: On the Putative History of German Idealism. Following the chapter on Schelling comes the coda on Nietzsche, which is the final part of the book.

The connection between, in Nietzsche's words, the ‘grandiose Greek problem’ (124) and modern philosophy is twofold. It is expressed both by the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress this dimension and by the mark of this inability to suppress: the fissure. This signifies the ‘gap that allows for [the] occurrence’ (11) of thought. In the first full chapter, such fissures are traced in the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. The work of unearthing the traces is done very quickly and cursorily. Hume and Kant take up half of the twenty pages devoted to these six thinkers: Freydberg has written on both (David Hume: Platonic Philosopher, Continental Ancestor (2012); Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (2005)), and his active referencing of these earlier works provide occasions for the most interesting parts of the chapter. For instance, in the discussion of Kant the role of imagination in synthesis is extended to moral judgments. Kant seeks to repel the influence of imagination in the moral context, but Freydberg shows the importance of its unacknowledged role even here, relying partly on the argument developed in his own earlier work. The ‘key Kantian view’ is here that ‘imagination is blind but indispensable, operating out of the dark’ (28). In the other half of the chapter, which covers Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley in ten pages, engagement with the text themselves is shown far less explicitly. The section on Locke in particular indeed appears ‘all-too-quick’ (18) and is satisfied with noting that ‘the thought of substance’ discloses a fissure within Locke's thought, as the notion of substance is required to hold up the universe but is itself infamously ‘defined’ as ‘I know not what’ (19). Freydberg still finds time to call Locke a ‘major philosopher’ and the most frustrating specimen of that class of philosophers, in whose work ‘[s]illy arguments and rhetorical flourishes mix with crucial insights and bursts of inspiration’ (both, 18). None of these claims are substantiated: we are simply asked to accept that Locke is the most frustrating among major philosophers, and that the mix Freydberg describes is indeed a fitting characterization of his work, or even one that brings out the full potential of the idea of a fissure brought to bear on Locke's thought.

While as noted the engagement with Hume and Kant is much more explicitly based in the letter of the texts themselves and thereby gains in interest, the sections in general place too much weight on direct re-engagement with the nuances of key primary texts. Much promising material is left unused for this reason. For instance, Jerome B. Schneewind's work on the ‘Sources of Darkness’ in Kant and Susan Neiman's reading of Kant in Evil: An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy (2002) are so close to the main theme of the book, and would contribute to the argument in such a decisive manner, that the scope and effectiveness of Freydberg's analysis is limited severely by his choice not to consider them. The only author who is regularly invoked outside of the thinkers discussed is John Sallis; other than that, Deleuze's portrayal of Spinoza is the only recognizably philosophical commentary that is used to aid Freydberg's interpretation of Modern philosophy. He notes in passing that ‘Deleuze shows himself to be one of the very few who can think along with his extraordinary forebears’ (64). One is left with a general sense that much more could have been done to make a compelling case.

In the chapter on Spinoza, Freydberg draws heavily on Presocratic fragments in an attempted ‘reinscription of Spinoza in the history of modern philosophy’ (40). The entrance to the required new perspective on Spinoza is heralded by the employment of what Sallis calls a ‘countertranslation’ (40): the full title of the Ethics is rendered in Greek and this is chosen as the basis for a reinterpretation of the Spinozist system, and Parmenides and Heraclitus are soon introduced as ‘direct if distant ancestors of Spinoza’ (43). In these sections one of the most admirable qualities of the book, namely the richness of its own Greek foundations, shines through. Whether this foundation of Freydberg's own approach can fruitfully be seen as foundational to Spinoza remains another matter. The case seems convincing at some junctures and less so in others. For instance, the analysis of Spinoza's attitude towards the mob (‘contempt for the hoi polloi’, 70) and the consequences this implies for democracy seem particularly lucid. However, the preceding section which seeks to forge a connection between Plato's Symposium and Spinoza's Ethics seems to proceed on far too shaky ground. What generates these contrasting evaluations is that, for good or ill, all of these connections are left entirely to the reader's intuition, with little guidance from Freydberg.

The chapter on Schelling is the most convincing demonstration of the anteriority thesis, perhaps because the connection between Greek myth and his own philosophy is borne out by the letter of Schelling's own texts. Themes that have been hinted at throughout the book, such as hearing (rather than seeing) and the depth that is present in Greek thought, are fully developed only now, for instance in a discussion of Schelling on music (103–107). The concept of bicentrality also adds an interesting dimension to Freydberg's earlier work on Schelling (in particular pages 114–115). Both as part of the project of the book and in terms of the wider scholarship on Schelling, this chapter shows the basis for contending that ‘chaos can never be overcome or cancelled out’ (120). The book's claimed survey of Modern philosophy thus exits from latency into manifest form only when it nears its conclusion, and with respect to a limited part of the historical development it sets out to describe. In the final part of the book, the early Nietzsche provides a continuation of the Greek- and music-oriented aspects that were the clearest connectors between Schelling's thought and the chaos that is seen to be at the basis of all of Modern philosophy (page 7: ‘This Coda carries through the previously concealed history to its most manifest disclosure’). The coda, though short, is for that reason one of the strongest parts of the book.

One gets the keen sense that this is a book written in reverse, starting from the vista from Schelling to Nietzsche and then proceeding to excavate the deeper layers of thought that are, perhaps almost entirely, covered up by the appeals to rationality and other such appeals that are part and parcel of the Modern tradition. The book itself appears caught between this great ambition and the stylistic and scholarly choices made by its author. Freydberg notes the following in the acknowledgements, relating to the beginning of the writing process that in the end led to A Dark History of Modern Philosophy: ‘Somehow I supposed that if I ‘loosened up’ and wrote from ‘inspired intuition’, the result would be stunning’ (ix). While Freydberg does note a series of important changes made to the initial version of the book, the general spirit of ‘loosening up’ and ‘inspired intuition’ can still be seen or perhaps heard in many parts of the book. That means that in the end, the great erudition and general relevance of Freydberg's interpretation of Schelling in particular has not been replicated throughout all other parts of the book. One suspects that this is also the result of a conscious stylistic choice: the chaos-favoring message of the book is reflected in the structure of the book and its overall build-up, and vice versa; and this is arguably a better fit for Schelling than for some other authors. This is a book on ‘darkness’ that is itself rather dark, but perhaps this is what enables it to have the shining moments that it certainly does display.